Honest Voting

This post on the ACM Risks Digest shows how shallow the awareness of basic electronic voting security can run.

Democrats Abroad is the organization the Democratic Party set up to keep in touch with the six-million Democrats who are temporarily or permanently living abroad. Just because you’re out of the country doesn’t mean you should be prevented from voting, said the party, and so they set up what they called a “Global Primary.” In some places you could vote in person, but the goal was to hold the primary over the Internet. A noble enterprise.

Unfortunately, as Peter Kaiser reported in the February 25, 2008 Risks Digest, the party mismanaged the electronic security of the “Global Primary” from start to finish. Here are the errors he noted:

• Registration was handled on unsecured web pages.
• Voters’ ballot numbers and PINs were distributed via email.
• The (secured) voting pages required Java but didn’t let a Java-less user know that until he or she had already entered the ballot number and PIN, leaving that user’s vote in limbo. What happens to a vote cut off in midstream? No way to tell.
• The ballot included candidates who had already withdrawn their candidacy. What happened to a vote from someone who didn’t know that and happily voted for their no-longer-a-candidate? No way to tell.
• At the end, voters were encouraged to print out the record of their votes. However, the website reportedly said that those printouts were non-binding, so really, why bother?

And these are people who want to lead the United States into a safer electronic age? Crack a book, why don’t you?

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